Software Requirements: Styles and Techniques [Paperback]

Suitable for most any IT professional who wants to build better software, Software Requirements: Styles and Techniques offers a surprisingly readable textbook-style treatment of software engineering's numerous attempts to get it right with defining requirements. Surveying almost every conceivable style of defining requirements, yet remaining thoroughly practical, this book can let your organisation do more with its requirements documents, which is a good step to creating software that succeeds better with your users.

Though everyone in software design knows about requirements, actual examples have usually remained shrouded in secrecy whether out of concerns over intellectual property or client confidentiality. One considerable strength of this title is that the author has seen many good and bad requirements documents and come up with several complete samples for a Danish shipyard and two hospital systems that can be published here.

Reading Software Requirements will likely convince you that you can do better with your requirements documents. Though there is no one "best" way, certain types of requirements work for certain situations better than others. This text can help you choose. Certain to be required reading for serious software analysts, this title can also benefit virtually anyone who works with software design documents. Its clear presentation style, remarkably devoid of jargon, helps make this book a great resource for a wide range of readers, with or without a background in traditional software engineering. --Richard Dragan

Most IT systems fail to meet expectations. They don't meet business goals and don't support users efficiently. Why? Because the requirements didn't address the right issues. Writing a good requirements specification doesn't take more time. This book shows how it is done - many times faster and many times smarter. This book covers many aspects of requirements.  Styles: Traditional and more cost/effective ways of expressing requirements.  Techniques: Ways of gathering, verifying, and maintaining requirements; ways of getting commitment from the stakeholders and support - yet limit - innovation; ways of ensuring that you meet your business goals.  It discusses the styles and techniques useful for different project types, for instance software developed specifically for the customer, software bought off-the shelf and adapted for the customer (COTS), and software developed for a broad market.  The book illustrates everything through real-life examples. It also deals with difficult requirements, for instance how to specify ease-of-use, how to specify very complex computations, and how to deal with 200 reports that the old system has, and the new system may or may not need.  The book shows two complete, real-life specifications and large parts of several others. It also has exercises and figures for presentation.

 Most IT systems fail to meet expectations. They don't meet business goals and don't support users efficiently. Why? Because the requirements didn't address the right issues. Writing a good requirements specification doesn't take more time. This book shows how it’s done - many times faster and many times smarter.  What are the highlights?

• Two complete real-life requirements specifications (the traditional and the fast approach) and examples from many others.
• Explanations of both traditional and fast approaches, and discussions of their strengths and weaknesses in different project types (tailor-made, COTS, and product development).
• Real-life illustrations of all types of requirements, stakeholder analysis, cost/benefit and other techniques to ensure that business goals are met.
• Proven methods for dealing with difficult or complex requirements, such as specifying ease-of-use, or dealing with 200 reports that might be needed because they are in the old system.

 Who is it for?  Everyone involved in the software supply chain, from analysts and developers to end users, will learn new techniques, benefit from requirements written by other specialists, and discover successes and failures from other companies. Software supplierswill find ideas for helping customers and writing competitive proposals. Programmers and other developers will learn how to express requirements without specifying technical details, and how to reduce risks when developing a system. Students aspiring to IT careers will learn the theory and practice of requirements engineering, and get a strong foundation for case studies and projects.  Who is the author? Soren Lauesen is currently professor at the IT-University of Copenhagen. He has worked in the IT industry for 20 years and has been a professor at Copenhagen Business School for 15. He has been co-founder of three educational and two industrial development organizations. His industry projects have encompassed compilers, operating systems, process control, temporal databases, and software quality assurance. His research interests include human-computer interaction, requirements specification, object-oriented design, quality assurance, marketing and product development, and interaction between research and industry. He has a broad range of other interests ranging from biology to dancing and foreign cultures.

Soren Lauesen has close to forty years' industrial and academic experience in software development. He has worked as a  developer of real-time systems and other software, co-founded software development centers at two companies, and worked as a  management consultant for ILO in Ghana. He is currently a professor at the IT University, Copenhagen, Denmark, dividing his time between research, teaching and consulting.